With O&M as the greatest expense over the lifetime of a building, the “blueprint” of your routine maintenance plan should be as thorough as your architectural blueprints. Blueprints convey lots of information about a structure. They can easily share an overview and, as you look closer, reveal the finer details that…

Frustrated by your CMMS work order or PM system? Annoyed that you have to login and remember how to use the software that’s completely overkill for simple tasks? Sick of getting hung up managing and closing tickets? You are not alone. Does this scenario sound familiar?: Go find a computer….

Without maintenance, our built environment would fall apart. Maintenance quite literally keeps the lights on. Our culture, on the other hand, seems to value “innovation” over all else, and it’s leading to unfortunate consequences. Andrews Russell and Lee Vinsel’s excellent article, Let’s Get Excited About Maintenance, aims to turn that…

If you use a work order system to generate tickets for routine maintenance tasks, it’s time to rethink your process. Work orders are really great at some things, but tracking routine preventative maintenance tasks isn’t one of them. When you dump your PMs into your work-order system – usually the…

Is it really November already? It seems like just yesterday we were looking forward to the warmth of summer. Now for many of us, consistently cooler weather means that our boilers are running: heating season is here. Like all equipment, boilers require routine inspections and maintenance. The specifics of those…

Fall means a lot of things to different people, but for us in facility management in most of the country, it means the end of cooling season. Properly shutting down the cooling equipment, including cooling towers, is very important. As fall progresses into winter, rain and snow will put your…

A university’s maintenance team is crucial to the success and safety of its staff and students. Unfortunately, management doesn’t always get this, and facilities budgets are often one of the first to go when times get tough. Facilities management needs to harness the power of the data they collect on…

Annmarie Bhola is a former engineer and the owner of Enhanced Building Solutions, LLC – EBS is committed to transforming the culture within the building industry through training and leadership. With so much PM software to choose from, how do you make a decision? The reality is, it can be…

Annmarie Bhola is the owner of Enhanced Building Solutions, LLC – EBS is committed to transforming the culture within the building industry through training and leadership. I recently read “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and wanted to share the ALCOA Plant story: In 1987, one important change created…

The cost of a business’s facilities portfolio is one of the most expensive items on the balance sheet. As everyone is increasingly expected to do more with less, it can be challenging to argue the decision to “fix something that isn’t broke” – also known as preventive maintenance. But according…